The Collected Works

 A repository of everything

…masses of junk, no other way to describe them. Huge angular chunks of metal, twisted and fractured, piled up into the darkness. Violent husks torn from buildings, beaten and deformed. Smaller debris amongst the mounds, bouncing down from a great churning funnel of light overhead, a cacophonous jettison of matter. A tremendous metal arm occasionally presents itself, ripping through that spinning glory and disgorging the contents of another sphere. Unidentifiable masses, useless trinkets, bits of exotic gadgetry and the shattered bodies of mysterious flora and fauna. A thousand colors of dust, drifting down onto the aggregate of twice that many worlds. And leeching from these lurid peaks, a glittery stream of the most profound…feeling. Pain. Sorrow. Nostalgia. Washing over me in waves. At once nauseated and filled with wonder, I fall to my knees. What could be the purpose of this?

I can only clutch at my ears as the vast cavern trembles and vibrates. The machines at work continue with their tasks. One skitters nearby, about the size of a large sheep, persistent in its labor. As it passes I can see a central pillar, a hub of whirling gizmos and pumping pistons. Four articulated legs with hooked feet scramble over the debris, searching. It seems to be a makeshift device, cobbled together out of various parts and plated haphazardly with bits of precious metals. Two glowing red gems on stalks seek out its target, a meter long slab of ornately carved pink stone, balanced atop a rippling washboard of fuzzy yellow slime. A beam of white light flows forth from the front of the machine, precisely encompassing the slab, and is imprinted on my eyes in a blinding flash. When I can see again, the surface of the slab is emblazoned with a pair of markings. One is unfamiliar, but according to Hen’s diary₁, the other is used to signify warmth, or fire. The machine turns, its business with this slab apparently complete, on to the next task. From here I can see what appears to be a churning mass of vegetation, like a colony of blue-green algae. It floats inside the foggy dome, tendrils reaching out to caress some sort of device within. Its lightstalks pause and dim as they pass over me. The mass within gathers itself into a tight ball, quivering…then bursts! The dome is filled with swirling green mist. It reforms, and to my astonishment, begins to shape itself into a loose ovoid, with the semblance of human lips and teeth. Clinking hesitantly, it moves closer, in a manner that suggests curiosity. Dreamily I watch as the lips slowly widen and a sense of calm prevails. Something else too…joy? Hope? Desire? It is unnerving and alien, but undoubtedly the warmest smile I have ever received…Companionship.

Delias Pitro - 10 Years in the Pit: Unexpected Romance in The Strangest of Places

Hi folks! If you’re still reading, you’ll know it’s been a month since I last published. I did send out a Note here, but it turns out that doesn’t go out to email subscribers and is just a Substack thing and wasn’t what I was hoping for. No big deal, but I’ve made the decision to switch to monthly publishing now instead of at the end of the #Dungeon23 project. Too many irons in the fire, as always. Still catching up on daily entries though, and I think I’ll only be a few weeks late to complete the year! I’ve been thinking a lot about my goals for this sort of writing challenge. I had a half-assed plan coming into the year, and that lasted me about three months. Other inspiration has appeared throughout, and I’ve tacked those ideas on, with varying degrees of coherence. Mostly I’m trying to remember this is about the process and about putting something down on paper, so most of these entries are not well planned or premeditated. This is about spontaneous creation, which is always a struggle. I did spend a little of my customary Substack time two weeks ago sitting down and making a rough conceptual plan for the last two months/levels of the dungeon. How do you finish a thing like this? Does the story have an ending? Maybe, but it’s all based on play, not on some overarching narrative or plot, so it’s not up to the author. Is there some sort of giant boss monster to slaughter for a satisfying ending? Probably not. Long combats are boring. Will you save the world? Possibly, but that’s more of a bonus. I won’t tell you here what I’ve settled on, but I have a plan and it feels like it makes sense with my initial vision. This has made the actual composing of dungeon rooms go pretty quickly when I sit down to write and I’ve been cranking out three to five entries at a time, a few days a week. That feels good, but I haven’t worked on any other writing projects. I’ve got four maps to share, and I hope you enjoyed that bit of weirdness at the top. If you read my Note, you’ll know that little illustration was done in a rush of inspiration late at night after finishing a tightly detailed bit of inking for a professional illustration job. Just my brain letting go and embracing some freedom for a change, enjoying watercolors and metallic pens. Relevant to this area of the dungeon and fun to make. Now, maps!

Week 39: By the time I reached the end of Level 9, I had a number of questions about how travel and exploration will work throughout this labyrinth of mirrors and dimensions. It has occurred to me that many of the secrets and areas of the megadungeon are merely paths to someplace else, as I’ve previously shared. I guess that fits with some of the other themes, and makes me feel like this dungeon is less of a complete adventure than a nucleus of possibility. In general, I don’t like endings. They’re usually anticlimactic and unsatisfying…so endless avenues of access and wonder are appealing to me. This page contains a single day of October, so we see the elaborate entrance to a much more concrete physical place, once again with a top-down map.

Week 40: The concept of the dungeon as a sort of accretion of other things, peoples, and…stuff has also crept into my mind gradually as this project has progressed. It fits with some broader ideas I had earlier and inspires some really interesting new ones. If you go all the way to back to my first post (now migrated over here from Blogger,) I used the term Occlusion as a working title, but most often refer to this simply as The Pit. One way I like to use “Occlusion” is in the arboreal sense, to refer to the way a tree will continue to grow over a wound in unpredictable and unusual ways. What happens when a tree can’t heal itself and must rely on assistance, whatever form that may take? More on that at a later date, but I love the idea of a massive repository of stuff, raw material for repairs and renovations. So, this level resembles a landfill. It’s far more alien than that, and the accumulations here are intentional and must be sorted, catalogued, and sent to the appropriate areas for proper use. Physical items and resources are important, but the most valuable things here are experiences, memories, and dreams. I’ve also decided that access to this level may be granted freely, provided the proper paperwork is filed and guidelines followed. Yes, bureaucracy is hard at work here on Level 10.

Week 41: Other than the entrance and a secret shaft, this level is one huge “room,” drawn in four quadrants. A few varieties of sentient machine/cyborg/otherworldly intelligence live and work here (like our little friend above,) processing and sorting. It wouldn’t be a good dungeon level if there weren’t also some disruptors in the mix, their loyalties unpredictable and fleeting. One important visual theme here is that much of the physical material is, by surface standards, quite valuable. Gold and silver and jewels are everywhere, but they are used to plate machines, build strange dwellings and utility buildings, and pave mosaic walkways. To the inhabitants of this level, it is just more stuff. Shiny, but otherwise unremarkable. This should be a fun area to illustrate.

Week 42: That means only ten more weeks! As of this post, I am finished with Week 46 and the end is in sight! This page features one of the aforementioned disrupters, barricaded off from the rest of the level, shaping an unusual garden of metal trees and clumps of wiry moss. Immensely powerful but tragically alone, it seems to have found a way to live in some sort of balance with the “normal” functioning of this place. It is searching for a way to communicate with others of its kind. Like most NPCs in the dungeon, it is dangerous and reactionary, but not entirely unreasonable or hostile. Everything is negotiable. All the maps of this level have thin white lines meant to represent access tunnels in and through the heaps of junk. These are meant for small automated drones, but a small animal (or PC?) could navigate them as well. Sneaky.

This post has been converted from a previous Substack post and dated accordingly. Please let me know if it seems like something got lost or if you find any major formatting issues.

Hey, thanks again for stopping by! Share and subscribe, all that business. I hope you enjoy whatever form of winter holiday you choose to celebrate or ignore. See you next year!

Andy

₁ - footnote lost